The City With a Death Wish in Its Eye

James McAuley is a Marshall scholar studying history at the University of Oxford.

FOR 50 years, Dallas has done its best to avoid coming to terms with the
one event that made it famous: the assassination of John F. Kennedy on
Nov. 22, 1963. That’s because, for the self-styled “Big D,” grappling
with the assassination means reckoning with its own legacy as the “city
of hate,” the city that willed the death of the president.

It will miss yet another opportunity this year. On Nov. 22 the city,
anticipating an international spotlight, will host an official
commemoration ceremony. Dallas being Dallas, it will be quite the show: a
jet flyover, a performance from the Naval Academy Men’s Glee Club and
remarks from the historian David McCullough on Kennedy’s legacy.

But once again, spectacle is likely to trump substance: not one word
will be said at this event about what exactly the city was in 1963, when
the president arrived in what he called, just moments before his death,
“nut country.”...